🧠 **精神病的核心症状复杂多样**：精神病并非仅仅是妄想，它是一个包含思维障碍、幻觉、妄想和阴性症状的综合征。其中，认知功能障碍和阴性症状对个体功能的影响可能比妄想和幻觉更为严重，一些研究者甚至认为认知是精神病的核心症状。

🤖 **AI 并非精神病的直接成因**：目前没有证据表明 AI 能够直接导致精神病的发生。AI 可能在某些情况下加剧已有的精神病症状，但要证明其因果关系需要长期的纵向数据，而目前的聊天机器人使用历史尚不足以支持这一论点。

🏷️ **“AI 精神病”标签的局限性**：使用“AI 精神病”这一标签可能存在误导，因为它暗示妄想是精神病的唯一或核心症状，并且 AI 是精神病的直接诱因。这种说法未能反映精神病的复杂性，也缺乏科学依据。

💡 **更精确的描述方式**：为了更准确地描述 AI 对个体信念可能产生的影响，作者建议使用“AI 强化的妄想”（AI enforced delusions）等术语。这有助于区分 AI 可能带来的影响与精神病相关的医学状况，避免不必要的混淆。

Published on September 19, 2025 3:18 AM GMT

What is psychosis

Psychosis is a syndrome (a collection of often disparate symptoms) that includes thinking problems, delusions, hallucinations, and negative symptoms. People with psychosis often present very differently. Most crucially, you can have psychosis without delusions, if you have other core symptoms such as hallucinations and disorganised thinking.

The most important symptoms of psychosis

Delusions and hallucinations are often seen as the 'core' symptoms of psychosis. This is because they are the most dramatic, but also because they are the symptoms that can be treated by antipsychotics, which led to the first dopamine theory of psychosis. However, impacted cognition and negative symptoms are often more serious in terms of their impact on functioning. Some in the psychosis research community argue that cognition is the core symptom of psychosis Schizophrenia is a cognitive illness: time for a change in focus - PubMed.

What do people mean when talking about 'AI psychosis'

Some academics in psychiatry have begun to talk about how AI may exacerbate psychosis. What I don't think has been suggested is that AI can cause psychosis in those who would not have developed the disorder. To know this you would need (at least) longitudinal data, which isn't available due to the recency of chatbot use.

Why 'AI psychosis' is an unhelpful label

It is quite unlikely that chatbot use can cause the brain dysconnectivity that is evidenced to be a neural substrate of psychosis. It is also unlikely that AI chatbot use can cause the dopaminergic neural bases of psychosis. Rather, when examples are given of people believing unusual things because of chatbot use we are either seeing someone developing a set of beliefs that are unusual enough to be considered delusions, which is not psychosis, or someone who is developing psychosis whose delusions are shaped by chatbot use.

AI psychosis as a phrase suggests both that delusions are the core (and sometimes only) symptom of psychosis and that chatbots could cause serious mental illness, for which there is no evidence.

What could we call it instead

Something like 'AI enforced delusions' would avoid confusion with psychosis related medical conditions like schizophrenia.